Copenhagen Architecture Festival

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Scandinavia's largest architecture festival is back for the ninth year in a row with a big, loving and critical festival program—this time focusing on the theme 'Sense of Place'.

This year's theme 'Sense of Place' with the world premiere of 'Best City in the World', Hans-Christian Post's new city-portrait film about Copenhagen and its enormous transformation. From being on the brink of bankruptcy in the early 1990s, over the past 30 years Copenhagen has undergone great changes, and is today described as one of the best and most 'liveable' cities in the world.

From 6 till 16 October 2022, Copenhagen will be flooded with events, film screenings, debates, performances, exhibitions, lectures and guided tours, each exploring this year's theme "Sense of Place - What Makes a Place?" in their own way.

French philosopher Henry Lefebvre has defined places as "physical spaces that people naturalize through patterns, behavior and communication". From this perspective, creating space is not the same as creating a place: Places come into being as we read them, use them, relate to them. Places are phenomenologically experienced and culturally conditioned—we live them, and we have lived them every single day.

Place-making depends on countless factors, material as well as immaterial: from the aesthetic effects of the brick to the individual and collective memories embedded in the city's space over time. From feelings of home in the home and around the neighborhood, to the ideological discourses that affect the local community, the nation and the planet.

By exchanging perspectives about how we and others experience our surroundings, we can approach an understanding of a place's many layers: Why are some places welcoming and others exclusionary? And whom do these experiences apply to? Why do some urban areas succeed, while others fail?—And how do we actually measure success and failure today? How do we assign value to a place, and how does that set of values ​​affect the architecture and development of urban and rural neighborhoods?